Adewale Maja-Pearce

Adewale Maja-Pearce

You are the co-founder of The New Gong which your
website describes as ‘publishers of new writing and images’ and, intriguingly,
as ‘an experiment on how writers could
be useful to each other beyond drinking together’.

Talk to us about the origins of The New Gong

The idea for The New Gong began to take shape at
the tail end of my career as Series Editor of the African Writers Series (AWS)
at Heinemann in Oxford, UK. I saw that the imprint was coming to an end. Dulue
Mbachu, a good friend, writer and IT expert, had what I believed was a very
good novel in his manuscript War Games.
I had a collection of essays that had
been signed up for a publication that didn’t materialise due to a falling out
with the publisher.With Dulue as my
partner, we decided it would be a good time to commit to founding The New Gong.
We launched in 2005.

What about the vision driving The New Gong? In particular
the vision behind the collective approach, what you describe as
‘writers [being] useful to each other’.

First
of all,we were
determined to avoid the usual and costly problems of storage besetting
conventional publishers. Amazon and technological advances have made that
possible. The main thrust of the collective approach at The New Gong is to
enlighten young writers who often have a misconception of what publishing
amounts to and to provide resources for them. We provide them with an email
address at The New Gong, along with editorial services and the process of
loading up to Amazon, all of which they pay for. They can then target their constituencies by using
the resources of the internet. However, we first encourage them to go and find
a regular publisher which will publish their book for them and pay them
royalties. That is much the preferred option.

What is the significance of the name?

The
New Gong was Dulue’s idea. It evokes the village gong, town crier, that kind of
thing.

12 years on, how has this “experiment” played out
in practice, and what have been the main challenges?

The
lack of distribution networks in Nigeria has been a major obstacle. There is no
chain bookstore in the country like Borders in the US or WH Smith in the UK
which will stock your books nationwide once you send the required number of
books to their main centre. The infrastructure here – as in so much else – is
poorly (or not even) developed.

What prompted the publication of The New Gong's Issues in Contemporary Nigerian
Art by Juliet Ezenwa Maja-Pearce? And how - being an expensive enterprise to
publish art books - was it made possible?

My
wife, Juliet, who is a visual artist, simply asked The New Gong to publish her
book! From that experience we have evolved into a specialist publishing house
receptive to people with interesting ideas. The publication was made possible
with funding from the Ford Foundation which Innocent Chukwuma leads. I have
known Innocent since his days at the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO). He
liked the idea of the book. Ford provided support for printing in the UK,
distribution, marketing to university art departments and the launch. It was
held here in the garden.

In his history of art book, New Trees in an Old Forest, Jess Castellote laments the lack of a corpus
of art criticism in Nigeria to properly respond to the exploding production of
visual art.What has
been the reception to your book Issues in Contemporary
Art, so far?

It
has not been reviewed at all. Not even by academics at the various universities
which have copies. We don’t have a reviewing culture in Nigeria. It is my pet
peeve. We don’t have a culture of art or literary journalism. In the UK, there
is very high level reviewing, not academic criticism, just plain reviewing,
widely available.Journalism is in a
crisis in this country.

And how challenging has it been to market a publication
of this nature to a worldwide audience?

It’s
not a trade book. We’re not looking for the general public to buy it. As I
said, we are specialist and can target our audience. Aside from making hard
copies available, we have loaded it onto Amazon so that people outside Nigeria
can easily buy it as it’s online. I can sit here in my office and reach everyone
I need to reach anywhere in the world.

Having served as a member of the jury for
the once prestigious but now discontinued Noma Award for Publishing in
Africa, I thought you would be well-positioned to comment on the evaluation
processes employed by Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Ltd (NLNG) for the Nigeria
Prize for Literature.

What are your views, if any, about the way NLNG
Prize makes its selections for the longlist and shortlist?

I don’t know the ins and outs of the selection
process. I think there should be a non-fiction category but not drama. It’s
very conservative to restrict the categories to just poetry and fiction and
drama (and children’s books, I believe). I find this incessant novel-writing is
almost a cliché: you’re either a novelist or a poet. It cuts off other areas of
literature but I write non-fiction so I’m biased! (laughter)

But let’s talk generally about prizes: I was on the
jury of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa for two years. Sometimes it’s
difficult to disagree with the chair. One year a Zimbabwean woman writer,
Yvonne Vera, died in Canada. She had published a novel, Under the Tongue, which
I thought a good contender but the subject-matter – lesbianism – turned out to
be an extra-literary problem. I thought it could and should have won. The
quality of the writing was every bit as good as the one that won. On balance, I
would have given it to her because of the subject matter. This is exactly the
kind of space that literature should
be working in. That’s my own personal experience about judging a prize.

My feeling about prizes in general are that these
things don’t really matter. It’s nice for the person who gets $100,000! As far
as the NLNG Nigeria Prize is concerned, as I said, I don’t think drama should
be a category. Drama is active.

I digress but you mentioned contemporary literature
earlier in our discussion. I wanted to say that I don’t agree with the teaching
of contemporary literature. I think it
is a mistake, problematical. Because we are contemporary with it. We don’t know
what is important and what isn’t yet. Time hasn’t done its work. We know this
writer who died 100 years ago is good because their work has survived. We can’t
make judgments about contemporary art or literature.

Isn’t that what we are doing when we review a book?
Judging? What of the beauty of the writing or the value of the issues?

Yes, but we are making transitory judgments. We are
judging because we have to as reviewers. But our judgments are premature.

It’s all too subject to fashion. And even the books
we choose are based on fashion, public relations, which publisher is pushing
their book. For instance, I was talking to a Nigerian who lectures at a
university in America. I asked him which books his students are reading. Now, I
happen to dislike The Famished Road
and I have doubts about this beast called magic realism. It’s a tricky area. It
depends on language really, which is where The
Famished Road falls down. A good example of that kind of writing, and a far
better book, is Kojo Laing’s Search Sweet
Country. I told him I preferred Search
Sweet Country. He said “Absolutely!”
So I asked him, “Why are you teaching The
Famished Road, then?” He said, “Because
you can get it easily in the bookshops!”

Of course, Ben Okri won the Man Booker Prize. It’s
true, that’s what prizes do. They really help to market the book, and generate
sales.

Exactly, they distort. They depend on the judgment
of 2 or 3 people and they take on a life of their own, take up all the oxygen
and subsume everything else that may be much better. In 50 years’ time, I
hazard that Search Sweet Country will
still be there and The Famished Road won’t
be, but there I am making a premature judgment! The most famous writers of 19th
century England are not for the most part the ones we read today. Prizes
distract.

Let’s go back to the Noma Award, the high points.

You fly Business Class, they put you up in a nice
hotel, you eat and drink as much as you like. They don’t pay you, but you get a
stipend and they fly you to nice places. The only time in my life I’ve been to
Switzerland. The company of the other judges was a lot of fun.

Your quarrel with the Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka,
has been richly documented online. You have also generously provided
a record of the rancour between you and the contributions of others
to it, on The New Gong website under the title, ''My Original Sin Against
Soyinka”. http://www.thenewgong.com/originalsin.html

Tell us a little of the genesis
and escalations of this ‘battle’ and how you believe publicizing it,
to paraphrase your words, contributes value to Nigerian literature.

I’d written a review of his memoir, You Must Set
Forth at Dawn. I didn’t like it and said so. I thought it was sloppily
written. It was all over the shop. All celebrating Wole Soyinka. The value of
writing a memoir is that you are an actor in a wider drama. It ought to have
given us insight into the drama of Nigeria. It shouldn’t be celebrating you as
a person.

I wrote to him to ask him to share his thoughts on
his highly publicised fight with JP. I wanted clarifications about a remark he had
made in The Man Died, his prison memoir, regarding JP spreading a rumour
about his health at the time of his imprisonment, largely in solitary
confinement. There was concern at the time that the military government wanted
to get rid of Soyinka and Soyinka accused JP of going around the world claiming
that he – Soyinka – was suffering from syphilis.But all I got in return was this abusive
email. It took me by surprise. He was a lot
more concerned about the review than about the whole JP syphilis saga. From
then on I got a lot of abuse from him. At JP’s 80th birthday
celebration at University of Lagos, in his keynote speech, he accused me of
being a jumped-up non-writer, etc.

What did you think of Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama?

I liked it very much because Obama was grappling
with issues and using himself as a springboard. It wasn’t self-reverential.

Why did you go public with Wole
Soyinka’s rancour against you on The New Gong website?

I published the communications between Soyinka and
me in its entirety to set the record straight, as they say. People could then
make up their own minds, assuming they were interested. It was embarrassing.
Lola Shoneyin, the author (she’s Wole Soyinka’s daughter-in-law) and others
posted comments on Krazivity which my partner, Dulue, posted on The New Gong
site alongside my own communications with Soyinka. We wanted to present the
full debate. These things should be a lesson to us. Don’t become an old man and
behave like that. This culture we have of entitlement!This culture of “Don’t you know who I am?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t know who you are!” It’s so trivial.

If you wrote a biography of JP
Clark, your opinion of him must be very high.

Share your views about the poet.

He is Nigeria’s best poet, our unofficial poet
laureate. He had a rare talent which flowered early.Martin Banham, a lecturer at the University
of Ibadan, got a contract to publish a book called Nigerian Student Versefrom Ibadan University Press in 1960.When
he approached JP for a contribution, JP said, “I write poetry not student
verse!” Actually, he was right. He was writing poetry, not student
verse. His poetry post-civil war was radically different from his earlier work.

One of those who weighed into your clash with Soyinka
was the writer Ike Oguine. In his letter, he veers off the subject,
though, to address what he views as deficiencies in the content and style of
your criticism of Soyinka's play, The Road.

This is what Oguine says: “You cannot deal fairly with The Road without conceding the ambition behind its
complexity, the layers of meaning it seeks to engage. It is fair to
question whether that complexity was successfully engaged, but to judge it on
how good the pidgin in the play is or that sort of thing is simply to be
ridiculous”.

Would you be ready to re-consider
your critique of The Road in the light of
Oguine's thoughts?

Not at all. It was in the context
of the whole language issue. This is, to me, a matter of great mystery. One of the
chapters in my JP book is dedicated to not just The Road, not just to Soyinka, though he’s a good example of the
thing I want to talk about. Soyinka is a playwright of the Yoruba nation.
Yoruba land has a long and distinguished tradition of drama. It is the main
Yoruba literary vehicle. Moreover, at the turn of the last century there was
great consciousness on the part of Yoruba intellectuals to revisit their
culture which, due to colonialism, was under attack. By the early 1940s, this
led to a revival of Yoruba drama with Hubert Ogunde at its helm. He and his
troupe performed dramas across Yoruba land which the people could hear and understand.
A Nigerian political leader banned Herbert Ogunde’s plays but never banned Wole
Soyinka’s. But how do you communicate
with Yoruba people in English? Soyinka’s The
Road isn’t comprehensible to a Yoruba audience! Tolstoy wrote in Russian.
Write in your language and in your own cultural idiom. Soyinka is actually
writing English literature for a global English-language audience. The title of
that chapter was ‘What is Wrong With Writing
In Your Own Language?’ I went to every interview Soyinka has ever given and
this question crops up again and again. And he can never give a straight
answer. He says he doesn’t want to speak only to the Yorubas. In fact he has
betrayed his culture, just as Chinua Achebe has also done.

The problem is that this Yoruba
language, this Igbo language, will die if people don’t write in it.

Oguine also dismisses your comments on Chinua
Achebe as ''throwaway'' and as ''having no other purpose than to be
provocative.''

From time to time, I hear similar views aired about
your approach to literary criticism, which some might say is deliberately
provocative. Would you care to respond

People
have said that repeatedly. Maybe I’m blunt and direct. But I don’t say what I
don’t feel. If I say it, it’s because I feel strongly about it. Maybe it’s the
way I say it, not the content. There are many things in this society we don’t
say bluntly because we don’t want to cause offence. So we as a small boy
must sweeten the thing so in the end we miss the whole point. It’s the ways we
are silenced. It’s a whole hierarchy.

You were the Series Editor for the famous
African Writers Series (AWS) published by Heinemann.

Can you go back in time and talk to us about
your experience while you served in that capacity.

I
was brought on board as a consultant by Vicky Unwin, the publisher. We could
only publish six titles a year. The series itself was initially sustained by
the burgeoning need for books in Nigerian universities. But once IBB came in
and the IMF introduced the Structural Adjustment Program in the mid-1980s
everything changed. Things Fall Apart was like the American economy
before the Chinese came, but other than that scale was not enormous at AWS. Things
Fall Apart by itself sustained the series. It was a calling card. Everyone
had read it. The second money spinner was another Achebe title, No Longer At
Ease! I made some innovations: introduced poetry, and Vicky allowed me a few
anthologies and I sneaked in some stand-alones. The readers of our manuscripts
were European Africanists, by the way, not Africans. AWS was based in Oxford.
Publishing African books in Oxford is paradoxical, a contradiction somehow.

AWS
was a tricky series also, being a trade imprint retailed by an educational
publisher. Educational publishing is about scale - so the imprint never really fitted
in.

Of your books, the one I know the best is The House My Father Built published by
Farafina Books. You are, however, recognised locally and internationally
for several more, and now I'm quoting, “illustrious work(s)” ranging
from your volume of Christopher Okigbo's Collected Poems (1986) to your travel essay, In My Father's Country(1987).

Can you tell us which of your books holds the
deepest personal value for you, and why?

In My Father’s Country was the first part of a trilogy. The House My
Fatherbuilt was the second. I jokingly tell people that the third
one, which I haven’t written yet, will be ‘A Farewell to My Father’s
Country’!

I
left Nigeria when I was sixteen for the UK. I came back twenty years
later.When I left, my notion of Nigeria
was limited to Obalende, where I schooled, and Ikoyi, where we lived.It was my boarding school memories which
brought me back. I was happy there. It was my first time out of the colonial
bubble of Ikoyi with its St Saviour’s and Corona Schools, where we even had
teachers from England. I learnt to speak Pidgin (so-called) and made good
friends, some of whom I retained. While I was living in England, I wrote short
stories called Loyalties based on my memories of Nigeria.

My
Dad died in 1981 and left this property to my three siblings and me. An uncle
came to visit us in 1983 and invited me to come to Lagos and spend a holiday
with him and his family. I connected with some Gregs guys and wrote something
about the whole experience for London Magazine which got picked up by an
editor who asked me what my plans were. I told him I wanted to travel back to
Nigeria, travel around and ask myself, ‘Am I a Nigerian?’ Which is what
I did. My travels coincided with Babangida’s coup. There was a lot of material for
a book. In My Father’s Country was eventually published by William
Heinemann. Later, I got a job as Africa researcher with the London-based Index
on Censorship which allowed me to travel freely to Nigeria and engage with
the tenants I had also inherited. The House My Father Built was about my
quest to get rid of them in one year. It took eight! The ordeal was hilarious,
great copy, and it was set against the turbulent background at the time:
General Sani Abacha, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s execution and so on.

The House My Father
Built has been very well received. Congratulations, Adewale. And thank you
for coming on Borders.Click Here to get a copy